Alarm systems play a vital role in ensuring a safe working environment across different industries. One or more alarm systems may be deployed in an industrial facility for detecting and alerting working personnel about unsafe working conditions. For example, alarm systems may be deployed in an oil & gas industrial facility, such as oil field, for detecting high concentration of harmful substances, such as Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S). Accurate detection and alerting by the alarm systems largely depend on the working of the sensors deployed in the industrial facility. It is observed that accuracy of the sensors may be influenced by environmental factors, such as ambient temperature, ambient pressure, ambient humidity, and the like. In other words, the sensors work well as long as the environmental factors are within a designed specification ranges. However, the accuracy of the sensors may be severely impacted in extreme climatic conditions, such as very low or very high temperature, high humidity, heavy rains, and the like. As a result, in such scenarios, the alarm system may get triggered even when the working conditions (for example, concentration of toxic substances) are within safe limits. For example, in extreme climatic conditions, an alarm for alerting about dangerously high concentration of H2S in a working environment may get falsely triggered even when the amount of the H2S is in safe limits. Such a false alarm may be called a spurious alarm.
As will be appreciated, when a spurious alarm is triggered in an industrial facility, various measures and safety protocols may be initiated so as to ensure safety and wellbeing of the working personnel. For example, these measures and safety protocols may include activating shutdown, initiating investigation, instrument maintenance, and so on. Thus, such spurious alarms, especially in remotely located locations, may lead to unnecessary expenses. Further, if frequency of such spurious alarms is high, overall operation cost may rise exponentially. Moreover, the spurious alarms may also lead to unnecessary fatigue amongst the working personnel, such as field engineers, which in turn may result in hazard due to negligence.
Current techniques to detect spurious alarms are limited in their efficacy and utility. For example, one of the techniques provide for monitoring status of alarm detectors. The technique may provide a command signal only when one or more of pre-defined alarm detectors are simultaneously triggered. However, the technique does not take into account various factors that trigger generation of spurious alarms, and, therefore, fails to detect spurious alarms in an effective manner. Further, current techniques lack intelligence and rely purely on user experience to determine correctness of any alarm.